Inside Al Jazeera

Nothing prepared us for what we saw happening across the Arab world this year. One network knew damn well how to report a revolution. Michael Paterniti takes us behind the cameras at Al Jazeera

Update: Al Jazeera English correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin, whose reporting from Tahrir Square our own Michael Paterniti wrote about for our June issue, announced today that he will be leaving AJE to become a Foreign Correspondent at NBC News:

On a cold March evening in Manhattan, Ayman Mohyeldin rode in the back of a black Lincoln Town Car on his way to an appearance on The Colbert Report. Mohyeldin (pronounced moh-hee-deen) is the Cairo correspondent for Al Jazeera English, which helps explain two things: (1) accustomed to the temperate winters of the Triumphant City along the lazy Nile, he was sorely underdressed for the windy stabs of Manhattan, and (2) after his network’s critically acclaimed coverage of the Egyptian uprising, he was in town to take his star turn on Stephen Colbert’s hot seat, constituting what promised to be a pop-cultural coming-out for Al Jazeera in the United States. Hunkered over his BlackBerry as the passing lights of the city tracered overhead, Mohyeldin kept up an evening-long ticker of e-mails and tweets to his 30,000-plus friends and followers. This is gonna be crazy, he pecked. Oh boy...bracing myself for a grilling...

Though Mohyeldin’s journalistic reputation continues to grow—born in Egypt, raised in Michigan, started as a gofer for NBC News, reared as a producer at CNN, first appeared on-camera for Al Jazeera in 2006—his is hardly a household name, not in America at least. And yet he’s the closest the network has to some rough approximation of an Anderson Cooper, good-looking, with a boyish air of derring-do. While his Facebook fan page debates his looks versus his talent—You can talk for hours, dear, and one never tires looking at you, writes one breathless female—the 32-year-old journalist was one of the few international reporters on the ground in Gaza in 2008 when Israel unleashed a barrage of air assaults that, by the time the fighting ended in 2009, would leave nearly 1,500 dead, many of them civilians. He’s interviewed Qaddafi and Bush. And after a Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire—a biblical act of protest that, ironically, was digitally projected to the world, catalyzing the Tunisian uprising—Mohyeldin went to Bouazizi’s village to file a report, then stayed on in Tunis, which is where he was when the Egyptian protests first flared in Tahrir Square.

With an eye on the Twitter feed—the numbers of protesters kept growing, 10,000...30,000...50,000!—Mohyeldin hurried home to Cairo’s Al Jazeera bureau, a slightly shabby three-room setup a short walk from the square, where already a handful of crews were at work, before crashing at his apartment in the tony Cairo neighborhood of Zamalek. In the rush of unfolding events, the Egyptian government had begun to cut off Internet service, an amazing feat in itself, and were moving to cut Al Jazeera’s signal. Mohyeldin’s first order of business was to go out and secure a vantage point from which to capture the action in Tahrir, one that would be good for live feeds. After a number of failed attempts to persuade people to open their well-perched patios to an Al Jazeera crew—the paranoia about reprisals was rife—he tried an eight-story apartment building, talked his way past the doorman, and caught the rickety elevator to the top floor. There, a door drew back to reveal a disheveled man, pot-bellied, wild-haired, wearing a Che T-shirt that read REVOLUTION. Behind the man lay a huge, cluttered apartment. "Who the hell are you?" he said.

"Do you want to make television history?" Mohyeldin had asked.

In subsequent days, Al Jazeera’s crews hustled to possess the story, giving narrative shape to the rise and resolve of the moral flash mob, to the armed clashes, to the ensuing capitulation of the military, which finally led to the implosion of a dictatorship. Before it was over, seven Al Jazeera English staff had been detained, including Mohyeldin. ("It’s absurd for me to talk about it," he says of his detention. "Al Jazeera journalists have been killed, spent years at Guantánamo, been harassed and beaten and groped, and I spent nine hours in a holding cell.")

What soon gave Mohyeldin’s coverage its gravity was a winning combination of indigenous insight and self-effacement, a fleet-footed, culturally nuanced brand of reporting that had previously taken a second seat to military embeds and broadcasts from the Palestine Hotel. But then, Mohyeldin’s success was no coincidence. The network had been preparing for an eventuality like the uprising in Tahrir Square for years, and when it came along, he was there—having been groomed for five years—to assume the starring role. Because Al Jazeera English isn’t carried by any major domestic cable distributor in the United States—it can only be viewed in odd-lot places like Toledo; Burlington, Vermont; and Washington, D.C.—curious Americans live-streamed the channel in droves, driving up traffic by 2,500 percent.

Backstage at the cramped Comedy Central studio on West 54th Street, Stephen Colbert popped into the green room (actually blue, with a perfunctory fruit-and-cheese plate on the coffee table) to say his hellos and to give his customary disclaimer about the character he plays on-air. "He says some terrible things," said Colbert. "It’s not personal." A moment later, Colbert was introducing the show to his pumped-and-primed audience in a rush of headline-freezes, each reserved for a different camera angle. "And my guest Ayman Mohyeldin"—here overenunciating the name, which sounded a little like "mujahideen"—"is a correspondent from Al Jazeera English. I’ll join him in the Situation Mosque..."

Uproarious laughter. Even from Mohyeldin, who shook his head now like, _Oh, man, here we go.... _

Soon enough, the two sat face-to-face at a roundtable, against a faux-stained-glass backdrop adorned with eagles, stars, and stripes, Mohyeldin with elbows propped, unable to stop smiling, Colbert balancing fingertips, summoning all that American id, that confected O’Reilly bluster and Cheneyesque paranoia. "Where is bin Laden?" he demanded.

"We don’t know," said Mohyeldin earnestly. "Nobody knows, to be honest with you." Colbert appeared skeptical. "Are you a Muslim?" he asked. "When were you radicalized?" Mohyeldin bleated a laugh, tried to explain that being Muslim, like being Christian or Jewish, didn’t involve a radicalization process. And so went the thrust and parry. At one point, Colbert pointed out that U.S. cable television has "seventeen Showtimes and a channel for pets," but no Al Jazeera. "How come if you guys aren’t dangerous, you’re not on any of our channels here?" Colbert asked, adding that the network makes "average Joes...a little skeeved-out."

If Colbert was giving voice to a September 11 mind-set that still secretly plagued the network’s image—Al Jazeera as a Trojan horse for extremism—Mohyeldin seemed to anticipate the question, assuming the measured voice of reason to Colbert’s contretemps. "Unfortunately Americans are being deprived of the choice of watching Al Jazeera," he said, "and people say that Americans aren’t interested in international news. I think that’s false.... The reality of it is these cable companies which are not carrying Al Jazeera are sadly helping to contribute to the misinformation.... "

On Colbert’s mock-news, this was the only true ideological clap line of the night, perhaps because the audience cottoned to the idea of free choice and unfiltered information, and from where I stood, sandwiched between two Al Jazeera PR people in the wings—a pair of young Americans named Molly and Sophia—there was a palpable sigh of relief. If the first question of the day was whether America was ready to give Al Jazeera a second look, then, at least here at the Comedy Central theater on West 54th Street, the network had reasonably survived the hard blast of American chauvinism played by Stephen Colbert, but more, they’d heard what they felt at least a little deserving of: some good old-fashioned American applause.

Doha, Qatar, the city that is home to Al Jazeera, feels like an Arabian-tinged Indianapolis, a million people, an estimated 75 percent of them foreign workers, inhabiting a propagating cluster of bright, faceless glass buildings, a place with an unhurried air befitting a country in which the average per capita income is around $88,000. In spite of the army of cockeyed cranes hovering over a spate of construction projects across the city—a building boom fueled by the $50 billion in oil and natural-gas income that flows to the country annually—Doha’s lasting impression is one of mall-shopping and shisha clouds pillowing over café patios as men in thobes (white robes), pants, and ghutras (head scarves) take their satisfaction from gurgling water pipes.

If Doha makes a somewhat sleepy home for a network that broadcasts to 250 million homes in 120 countries—and one that now aggressively competes against the big global news-gathering operations—the broadcast center outwardly betrays nothing of the frisson that goes into making news, either. The Al Jazeera compound floats squat and pale behind high fences near what’s called the Television Roundabout, in a part of town as featureless as Doha’s pale desert hold. The only giveaway is the tight security—for forty-five minutes, I was by turns regarded with suspicion, ignored, then offered tea—but once past the security gate and bomb-checking station, once through the metal detector, you reach a courtyard of sorts. The entrances to two equally nondescript, white buildings sit fifty yards apart, in detached conversation with each other: Al Jazeera Arabic on the right (broadcasting since 1996), and its younger sibling, Al Jazeera English, or AJE, on the left (broadcasting since 2006). When the Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak visited here back in the salad days, he famously said, "All this noise from such a small matchbox?"

I came pondering another question: What exactly was going on inside that matchbox? Though Al Jazeera operates under the aegis of its various mottoes—"Every angle, every side," "The opinion and the other opinion," "We set the agenda"—critics still question the network’s underlying motivations, analyzing everything from its source of funding to the pedigree and agendas of its commentators, none of which the network cares to hide.

As it is, Al Jazeera is mostly funded by grants from the emir of Qatar—Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, whose family has ruled the country since the mid-1800s. Although he’s spent millions on the network, it’s understood that the emir hardly, if ever, meddles in day-to-day affairs. ("Jazeera causes me a big problem," he admitted in a recent interview with the Financial Times of London. "In the past, many Arab leaders didn’t even want to talk to me.... I’ve been attacked by Osama bin Laden. He called me the Karzai of Qatar, but it’s okay. What shall I do?") And while the emir remains one of America’s closest military allies in the region—and is as progressive a ruler as one might hope to find in the Middle East (he helped broker the 2008 peace deal in Lebanon)—most Americans still best remember his network by the words of Donald Rumsfeld. "They are simply lying," declared Rumsfeld in response to reports by Al Jazeera that U.S. forces had intimidated civilians at Fallujah in 2004, labeling the news story "vicious, inaccurate, and inexcusable." In that moment, one more credible threat got added to the list, and, to this day, it may be the abiding reason why cable operators like Time Warner refuse to carry the network. (The reports from Fallujah turned out to be accurate, but accuracy seemed beside the point; even before the events in Fallujah, Al Jazeera bureaus in Kabul and Baghdad had been struck by U.S. missiles, killing a reporter and injuring a cameraman.)

More than any other network’s, then, Al Jazeera’s image resides in the eyes of its beholder, its logo, a calligraphy flame, making the perfect Rorschach. To Western governments after September 11, the network was a mouthpiece for Al Qaeda, while for Al Qaeda the network wasn’t mouthpiece enough. For conservative Arabs today—including many of the repressive regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Bahrain—it’s shockingly progressive, and therefore subversive; for progressives, it allows conservative voices, and therefore sounds repressive. For Israelis, the knee-jerk reaction is that the network ercises a constant anti-Jewish bias; for disgruntled Arabs, the network provides a legitimizing platform for the Israeli point of view.

For those who love their conspiracies soft-boiled, my PR liaison was named Osama, a friendly, sleepy-eyed guy from Glasgow, Scotland, blatantly armed with...a Scottish brogue (and I’m sure it will pain Osama, a good man, that I am even bringing it up). Wending my way in his footsteps, up a set of stairs and round a corner on the mezzanine level, the newsroom appeared below us, AJE’s coliseum as it were, lit in pools of yellow, blue, and pink light—what one employee called "a bloody casino"—where the happenings of the entire world, at that second, were being sucked in, processed, edited, and fed to one presenter who sat at the front, as if at the mother of all gold-glowing teacher desks emblazoned with the flame, feeding it back to the very same world that created this madness in the first place. Behind the desk, on a wall, a map ran in light blue while another map, in darker blue, scrolled in the opposite direction, then both were replaced with images of destruction and revolution in Yemen and Libya.

The real action, however, took place away from the presenter’s desk: in the editorial meetings, over phone calls to the field, down in the news pit where the producers clustered and bickered, and behind the glass in the control room where everything ran according to one universal clock that shows Greenwich Mean Time—and where at any given moment, the bank of screens sat cued with all the packages waiting to run, the live shots with correspondents fixing their hair in the field, powdering noses, trying to avoid the next shelling.

If the so-called Arab Spring recently focused American awareness on the raft of Middle Eastern countries trying to shirk their repressive regimes—from Tunisia to Bahrain, from Yemen to Egypt and Libya—then it also threw into high relief the difference between what we’ve come to accept as our television "news" here in America and what a network like Al Jazeera presents of the world each day, many times through a lens that has an almost populist, retro feel, hearkening to some earlier era—the advent of network television, say, when everyone was unknown, relatively untested, improvising as they went. In fact, Americans found themselves so hungry for full coverage and so stymied by their inability to watch Al Jazeera that 80,000 signed on to a "Demand Al Jazeera in the U.S.A." campaign.

But, then, what exactly were Americans hungering to watch? None other than Hillary Clinton offered a gambit. "Viewership of Al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it’s real news," the secretary of state told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee during a particularly heavy Charlie Sheen week on American TV. "You may not agree with it, but you feel like you’re getting real news around the clock instead of a million commercials and, you know, arguments between talking heads and the kind of stuff that we do on our news which, you know, is not particularly informative to us, let alone foreigners."

In the battle of substance over flash, few to none of the Al Jazeera correspondents are recognizable to U.S. audiences. Many have foreign names and accents; none have best-selling books atop the list or can be heard pounding their shoes on the nightly infotainment podium. While the correspondents are mostly smart and attractive (though it’d be fair to say, not all are "camera-ready"), the emphasis is not on coiffing or long slivered legs showing behind a glass news desk, all that we now take as a matter of course while being intubated with our news. "It’s not about the anchor here," said Imran Garda, one of Al Jazeera’s news presenters, as we sat in a little lounge off the newsroom while a suited man delivered tea in fine china cups, shoveling sugar for me with a silver teaspoon. "Same way with the correspondents, we don’t make that much of a big deal about our correspondents in the field. They’re not superheroes; the story is most important."

If you get talking to the people at AJE—the newsroom represents 50 nationalities, though the Aussies, Kiwis, Brits, and Americans constitute the biggest percentages—you hear a lot about "the story," about the channel being the voice of the voiceless, or "the street," or something called "the global south," a concept that even some of the AJE staff can’t quite define. Is it an economic south? A sociological south? And where does it start and end? (In general, the term, as interpreted by the Jazeerians, seems to speak to that class of people in the developing world who have been either patronized or ignored—or, worse, have had their problems mediated—by the global networks for too long.) But these aren’t dicta, says Garda. Everything is up for debate at AJE, which allows the nascent network its unorthodoxy, its horizontal decision-making (or decidedly antimonolithic stance), its powerful, at times useful, enigma. One of the most concise ways to think about AJE, Garda told me, was framed for him by a frequent commentator on the channel: If other networks are interested in the politician, the commentator said, Al Jazeera will always be interested in the politician’s driver.

The weekly 1 P.M. planning meeting brought this idea to full animation as a rotating group of roughly eight producers tried to form an exoskeleton for the day, and week, ahead. First came updates from the field: Ayman Mohyeldin was in Egypt, covering the ongoing, post-Mubarak protests (one pitting the Coptic Christians against Muslims had just led to the death of at least thirteen people); Hashem Ahelbarra, a slick-haired correspondent who kept popping up live in Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, wading through screaming protesters, was on the verge of having his visa run out and the Yemeni government had no intention of renewing it, which meant it was time for a Plan B. But the biggest concern was for those crews inside of Libya, where the shelling had been so fierce one cameraman had asked to be taken out, a rarity. "We had a 5 a.m. call from Hoda in Benghazi saying that Qaddafi was going to speak," said Heather Allan, head of news, a 57-year-old former NBC veteran, "and they were thinking about running to Tripoli. We need to fight off some of these bright ideas. Now she’s tired and has scrambled eggs for brains and is just starting her day’s reporting."

One producer, a Brit named Simon Harrison, chimed in about a suicide bomb that had just gone off in Peshawar, leaving thirty-seven dead. "One question: Do we go? We’re two hours away, but they’re wrapped up doing live feeds." Allan didn’t hesitate: "Why aren’t they there now?" she demanded. "We need to talk to the desk and get them up there to file at sunset, maybe stay a couple of days, have Kamal do some walk-and-talks. They’re always blowing people up in Peshawar," she said.

In the rapid-fire give-and-take, one correspondent was pegged to be in Monrovia by Saturday, and there was the immediate need to find a guest to round out a package on gem mining in Burma, someone who could talk about the corrupt ruling junta of generals, a task left to a young American from Utah named Devin Greenleaf. Allan was convinced that southern Sudan might "go off the rails" again. "Send Yvonne off leave or Andrew if his shoulder surgery has healed, but we need to launch quickly."

And then there was the damn royal wedding, and England’s ambivalence about it. Allan couldn’t work up the excitement, muttered aloud that there were too many people out on maternity leave at the office to keep up. "Everyone knocking up the missus," quipped Harrison, who then leapt the Atlantic: "Just so you all know, Latin America feels like it’s not getting the love with all of this Libya. What’s driving them crazy is that we ask for a package and then don’t use it."

In many ways, the gathering resembled the kind of story meetings you might find at any network in New York, Atlanta, or London, the only difference being that the conversation seemed to include the deeper kneading of oft-overlooked regions, in part a result of Al Jazeera’s recent expansion from over seventy bureaus to a projected eighty by next year. What increasingly differentiated AJE from the pack was its reach, its ability to gather input from Juba to Port-au-Prince, from Harare to Toronto—and its willingness to settle early in a country, with indigenous talent, and begin trying to read the tea leaves.

Soon, a packet went around itemizing about seventy potential stories that AJE was working on, from global arms dealing (in which, yet again, the U.S. had been identified by a Swedish report as one of the top suppliers) to aboriginal youth unemployment in Australia, from rhino poaching in South Africa to an upcoming protest in Lebanon. Allan paused over the last, asking a few questions. "It’s not Egypt...yet," she said. "Why don’t we bring in the truck for that one," she said. "Just in case something goes off there."

From Doha, I pushed on to Cairo, with plans to join Ayman Mohyeldin. My travel day happened to coincide with the arrival of fresh AJE teams, descending on the city to use the bureau as a way station before leaving for Libya. In the line at passport control, I met up with one of AJE’s true stars, correspondent James Bays, his booming baritone slipping to sotto voce, advising me not to mention the name Al Jazeera nor act as though we knew each other. "We’ve been banned here, mate," he said.

And it wasn’t just Egypt. What was surprising—and what might have been a mark of Al Jazeera’s real credibility—was the list of countries in which the network has been banned: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Yemen, among about a dozen. In fact, there was an unconfirmed rumor coming out of Libya now that Qaddafi had announced a million-dollar bounty on all Al Jazeera reporters, something that Bays shrugged off, but not without expressing concern for his colleagues already on the front line. "It’s very, very dicey at the moment," he said.

The next day, I met Mohyeldin at a coffee shop near his apartment where the well-to-do take their caffeine. He was planted at an outdoor table, in a pale sun, wearing a brown leather jacket, dark shades, and rakish stubble (that hadn’t gone unnoticed by a nearby table of youngish women), in conversation with a heavier-set man, perhaps the most important—and most popular—of the blogging tweeters in the Mideast, an activist named Mahmoud Salem, who goes by the handle Sandmonkey. During the uprisings, it had been Sandmonkey and a small, active group of bleeters who’d helped connect the mobs and orchestrate crowd movements—and who tweeted out routes so that people could get home safely. In barrages of sometimes sixty to eighty missives a day, Sandmonkey told his followers how to counteract tear gas with Coca-Cola and how to elude Mubarak’s forces, while simultaneously keeping up an acerbic, at times funny commentary on events as momentum grew for Mubarak’s departure. Mohyeldin had been a habitué of Sandmonkey’s tweets, as a partial guide to the revolution, but this was their first time meeting face to face, and so they sat for the next couple of hours—Sandmonkey smoking luxuriously, sipping coffee; Mohyeldin casually working to evaluate and cultivate another potential contact.

It was cheerful enough, but there seemed to be competing sensibilities. Sandmonkey was trying out what he labeled his "small-penis theory" of the Middle East that went like this: The Egyptians, who are macho, watched the Tunisians revolt, and they asked themselves: "Are we not men? Fuck it, let’s go!" But, then, Mohyeldin didn’t see much to the concept except as a punch line or tweetspeak. "Of course, it’s much more complicated than that," he said. "Of course," said Sandmonkey, "but in the end, perhaps not much."

It was a fascinating tableau, two young ascenders (Mohyeldin and Salem, who is 29) who’d played somewhat starring roles in events, both as auteurs in a sense, but perhaps not entirely convinced of who deserved top billing. Mohyeldin’s part had been to tell the story on-camera, where he constantly exudes a rational passion, capturing the building of a movement in long, live feeds; Sandmonkey had been, and still was, the punchy, 140-characters-a-shot, Molotov provocateur, whose complication came by accretion, but whose knowledge of the deeper machinations at work was undisputed. And yet perhaps a truer turn on the accepted version of events was that Al Jazeera’s rather quaint-seeming twenty-four–seven coverage had been as instrumental in the growing wave of protest as any social network, if one believes that images are equal to, or more powerful than words, and that people, desirous of change, after viewing tens of thousands of protesters on television risking their lives in a square will multiply themselves exponentially to a million, if only to see themselves reflected back to the last of their wavering brethren.

Eventually, Sandmonkey had an appointment—and Mohyeldin had me—and so the two said good-bye with the promise of more conversation. A driver then picked us up in a rickety sedan—no black Town Car here—and drove us in the direction of the AJE bureau near Tahrir Square. While Al Jazeera runs a multimillion-dollar international news operation, it’s hardly money spent on frills and wardrobes. Bureaus cost anywhere from $5,000 to $50,000 monthly to maintain, depending on location (Cairo’s price tag is about $30,000 a month), and true to the Jazeerian ethic, the correspondents and cameramen move close to the ground, in whatever the car—mostly of, not above, the people. Mohyeldin acknowledged that AJE’s "run-and-gun" attitude, and its compulsion to enter unfolding events in the shoes of the masses, sometimes gets its crews in trouble, wondering aloud if the network took more risks by sometimes diving too deeply into countries like Pakistan, Syria, and Libya. "We feel like dicks rolling up to Benghazi in flak jackets when the people there don’t have them," he said. In part because of the difficulty of getting gear across the border, some AJE teams had gone into Libya without them. In fact, journalists from many news organizations initially underestimated the severity of violence—and lack of cover—and, in the rush of breaking news, arrived ill equipped, though for the Jazeerians the affinities persisted: They often seemed all too willing to assume the same risks as the native population or to be quick to share the narratives of those most at risk in twenty-four–seven coverage—an equalizing gesture that evoked an uncanny sort of mutual allegiance.

Striding with Mohyeldin, past the Egyptian Museum of Antiquities and into the north end of the square, was like participating in the inevitable historical documentary that will someday feature Mohyeldin striding into the square, narrating events as they once occurred, for this was the place that had given him gravitas. Tahrir, which means "liberation," is the nexus of three major thoroughfares—as well as three other minor ones—and unlike the Ramses and Saad Zaghloul roundabouts in the city, holds no iconic statue at its center. Rather, the people have always considered it their square, and what major protests belong to Egypt’s past—the bread riots of 1977, opposition to the war in Iraq in 2003—occurred on its cobbles.

Mohyeldin reached down to those cobbles and handed me a chipped block of concrete. "This is what the protesters used as their ammo," he said. "And over there"—he pointed to a construction site—"is where they took the metal sheeting they used as shields, and to block all the entrances to the square." I struggled to picture the events that had unfolded here live only a few weeks before. Already they were receding into the grainy unreality of the past. When I tried to envision them what I saw instead were the images, Al Jazeera’s images, that I’d played and replayed on my laptop. "Imagine thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people camping day in and day out on a very simple, very nondescript piece of land, you know?" Mohyeldin said, doing his best to bring what he’d witnessed back to life. "No monuments, no plaques, no historical or pharaonic treasures displayed here, just the people."

As it turns out, the people may have been partly saved by that one Al Jazeera camera—placed by Mohyeldin on the balcony belonging to the man wearing the Che T-shirt. After the Internet was cut off, so, too, was the Al Jazeera signal. And yet that one camera, running off BGAN satellite technology and trained on the crowds below, beamed an almost protective image, an early powerful dissuasion to what many believe might have been an instant massacre. In fact, those in the crowd had begged Al Jazeera to keep its camera broadcasting for just that reason, which the network did. Eventually a screen was set up on the square, and Al Jazeera was broadcast directly to the protesters in a fantastic sort of metamoment: Seeing themselves reflected in AJE’s mirror, the crowd began performing for that camera. When opposition groups called for a million-person march, a stage was built in Tahrir Square, and big speakers were brought in. A tent city sprang up on the bull’s-eye of the traffic circle at Tahrir Square, and soup and blankets were being shuttled from the apartment of Mohyeldin’s new friend, the revolutionary bohemian with flyaway hair, down to the makeshift village, a gesture repeated by thousands across the city. And then those million people actually showed up, spilling out from the square into the arteries of the city, a kinetic flow of patriotic force that was replicated across the country in cities from Alexandria to Mansoura, Suez to Minya. The mandate seemed clear: The people wanted Mubarak done. And that night he addressed the nation, announcing that he would not stand for president again nor leave the office to anyone in his family—but that he had no intention of stepping down either. The protesters began bracing for a crackdown.

For Al Jazeera, there were two crackdowns: the official and the unofficial. The official included the military acting overtly against the network, cutting off its signal, putting pressure on service providers not to carry AJE, confiscating equipment and ID cards, arresting staff, revoking licenses. The unofficial crackdown was more insidious, and much scarier, relying on the demonization of the network. "Callers called into [state-media-run programs] saying that we have to do something against Al Jazeera," says Mohyeldin. And then the military stood aside, letting the pro-Mubarak supporters gather outside of a nearby hotel, where AJE had regrouped after its bureau was closed down, demanding that the AJE crews be turned out of the hotel so that they could be attacked. There were "people with signs against Al Jazeera, cursing Al Jazeera," says Mohyeldin. "That public incitement made the environment in Cairo that much more dangerous for us, you know?...When someone sees you on the street and says you work for Al Jazeera, that’s when...somebody can stick a knife in you, and no one is going to come to your defense."

One morning Mohyeldin, feeling wobbly, had taken up his BlackBerry and, standing before a mirror in his apartment in his undershirt, impulsively filmed a last statement. "I just wanted to say to everyone, my parents and my friends and my family," he said, "if anything happens to me today, know that it happened with me doing what I love doing the most."

The day immediately following the triumphant million-person march came the battle for Tahrir Square. Pro-Mubarak thugs arrived from as far away as Giza, five miles away, some on horseback, some on camels, some on foot, streaming into the square and unleashing a fusillade of rocks and Molotov cocktails and harsh beatings with bats and battens, swords and knives. The battle lasted at least twelve hours, with at least seven AJE crews trying to cover the action. Mohyeldin pushed to enter the square with the pro-Mubarak forces but was turned back. Meanwhile, his colleague, Sherine Tadros, in the square itself, fled down an alley furiously banging on doors, and was let in to a home where she spent the night; another AJE correspondent was forced to take refuge at the mosque where he spent the night as skirmishes continued. When dawn broke, the protesters still miraculously held the square.

"Once the physical battle for Tahrir had been won, and the military refused to fight the protesters," Mohyeldin said, "then the state media stepped up its psychological campaign, and that became the second battlefront." Every day brought a new permutation or intrigue—what did these protesters really want? What would Mubarak do? Finally, just when it seemed as if it couldn’t go on, Mubarak once again addressed the country on television. What he said was devastating. He insisted that, while delegating some responsibility to his vice president, he would stay on as head of state. "That’s when all the air went out," says Mohyeldin. "That’s when it felt as if we’d come to the end."

The next morning, a Friday, Mohyeldin remembers that the city was silent. "All you could hear was the call to prayer," he says. "That’s not normal. I mean, there was so much tension," as well as fear, anxiety, and exhaustion. What form would the final crackdown take? Camels and thugs? Fighter jets? Armed security forces? And how bloody would it be?

Now in the square something amazing appeared: a remake of the Egyptian flag. But in this version, the emblem of the eagle of Saladin had been replaced by the flame of Al Jazeera, the ultimate statement of allegiance by the protesters who felt that whatever may come, they still had their witness.

Mohyeldin got a haircut, lunched at the hotel where the crew was set up, and went upstairs to work. By afternoon, there was an announcement that the presidential council would soon be making a statement. Mohyeldin set up for the live feed. And then there was the vice president, Omar Suleiman, reading a twenty-second statement.

What followed was Al Jazeera’s climactic moment. While the other networks fumbled for meaning and explanation, at first waiting on the Arabic translation, Adrian Finighan, AJE’s presenter in Doha, said simply, "Hosni Mubarak has gone," and then the network went live to Tahrir Square, panning the exploding crowd for a full seven minutes without voice-over, letting the natural soundscape rise: People cheering, chanting, hugging, crying. People in shock, overcome, praying. That sea of flags, standing now for something new, thrilling, and idealistic, something yet in chrysalis.

When Finighan’s voice returned—"The roar of the crowd says it all..."—he cued the live feed with Mohyeldin. Moments prior, Mohyeldin had made a quick call to his father, the man who had taken his family from Egypt to Detroit, Michigan, in 1984, after the assassination of Anwar Sadat, in search of a better life for his two boys. Mohyeldin had never heard his father, a former military man himself, cry before—but now he cried openly, on the phone. "It’s your generation that did it," he said.

On-air, Mohyeldin had regained his composure, and to the end, was trying to place the right, carefully considered words atop the images on the screen. When Finighan finally asked him "to stop being impartial for a moment" and explain how he, as an Egyptian, felt, there was a beat of silence, and then a slight cough or laugh, as if he was slightly taken aback. Mohyeldin then rambled a little about the sacrifices made by so many, how the fall of one man had led to the rise of 80 million this night, and after drifting on for a while, he finally allowed himself to slip into first person.

"I never thought I’d live to see a day like this," he said.

Back in Doha, in the Al Jazeera bunker, it was 1 p.m. on a day in mid-April, and time for another editorial meeting. The network bounded on determinedly in its own state of revolution and self-evaluation. In fact, there’d been some spirited conversation after the fact, at headquarters, about Finighan having asked Mohyeldin to "stop being impartial." It seemed the Jazeerians weren’t ready to concede an inch of their hard-won, newly found reputation. "We want to hear the regional differences, we want to hear the regional accents, we want to have that experience from all over the globe," said Al Anstey, AJE’s managing director. "But it’s all underpinned by the journalistic integrity."

It was the kind of retro nitpick that might never have registered at another network these days. At AJE, however, it was reinforced again and again: The people could speak for themselves, on-camera, in the slums of Cairo or São Paulo or wherever they did their work. The real audacity of AJE was its willingness to identify those people and, in so doing, place itself on some outside edge (outside the corporate infotainment industry, outside the circles of power where most reporters live, outside the normal, predictable raft of stories even), and by trudging through protests and war wreckage, shantytowns and borderlands in hopes of mirroring back the true reality of the world, the network had made itself a target, too, all out of a belief that news—good old-fashioned news that reaches for some universal truth—still has places left to go and, now more than ever, a lot left to prove.

In Doha, Allan and company kept orchestrating the flow of crews and stories; the crews kept dispersing by planes and cars, through passport controls and border stoppings; the world unfolded itself in ever surprising and terrifying ways. To the Ivory Coast, to Burma, pushing deeper into Libya. On a day in Benghazi, returning from filing a story on the opposition, an Al Jazeera crew had been hunted and attacked in their vehicle by Qaddafi supporters, leaving one injured and a Qatari cameraman shot through the heart. I immediately received a text from Mohyeldin. Ali Hassan al Jaber—he was with me covering the Hajj. I should have been there, mike! And then a moment later: Try and get to a tv to watch what’s happening...what crowds are doing for al jazeera’s cameraman.

And sure enough, there it was, nighttime in Benghazi, the crowd chanting in the street below where an Al Jazeera team was doing live feeds. The correspondent held up al-Jaber’s glasses, examined the X-ray that showed where the white bullet lay in the man’s gauzy heart. The crowd below was chanting, "Al Jazeera forever!" Hoisted banners read, HERE AND NOW, LIBYAN AND QATARI BLOOD IS MID FOR THE SAKE OF FREEDOM. The casket of the cameraman, draped in a Libyan flag, was hoisted and carried high through the crowd, put in the back of an ambulance, and soon after, began its long, lonely trip back to Doha.

Whatever they felt at watching their comrade’s body go, whatever grief or weariness or fear gripped them there, and whatever target they made, the rest of the Jazeerians stayed in the field, doing live feeds.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (effective 1/4/2014) and Privacy Policy (effective 1/4/2014). GQ may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Condé Nast.